My First impression of the tank looking at the box was that it wasn't the painting catastrophe some of the other King Tiger's were (The first one
) The paint scheme was actually pretty well done, but there is no weathering. When I say no weathering, I mean zero, none, not even an attempt, and to me that is good and bad news. Bad because you don't get what you've paid for compared to past releases. On the other hand, since that weathering on past releases was usually really poor, you now get a "clean slate" to weather as you so choose. I also noticed something odd about the turret while looking at it in the box, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it...So after I opened the box and went through the ordeal of removing the tank and accessories it dawned on me what was wrong with the turret. The pictures of the tank I've seen on the internet of this tank looked great, nothing wrong with the turret at all, and what was suddenly so different about this tank no longer made it look normal. In what I can only attribute to an error in the molding of the pieces of the tank, especially the new turret, the designers failed to accurately judge the distances between parts(in this case the clearance between the bottom of the turret and the exhaust housings on the engine compartment door). This must have caused there to be problems between these two parts running into each other and not allow for proper turret rotation. Their solution? Make some weird turret ring thing that elevated the turret about twice the height from the hull it would normally be in order for it to clear the exhaust housings. This made the tank look BAD. I mean I even went out into the pile of moving boxes ( where my collection and books are currently located
) and busted out several examples of other 1/32 king tigers to compare it to just to make sure, one FOV w/production turret, and one 21st one w/ porsche turret. This made it even more obvious! I sat the tanks next to one another and there it was bright as day, the new FOV King Tiger looked like it was stretching its neck to see something on top of the fridge. Honestly it ruined the whole tank for me, and saying that I paid $55 for the beast I wasn't going to let that stand.First thing I did was go and dig out the dremel (sounds familiar to Krieglok lol). Then I grabbed a screw driver and set to disassembling the tank and getting at this added turret ring extension piece. After taking out 10 screws the piece finally came free. I could tell immediately that this piece was an after-thought, added by Panache Place to correct a problem they probably didn't realize existed until the last minute. It is about, idk, a quarter inch thick, and it needed to be slightly less than a eighth of an inch to make the tank look right. So now came the dremel. I ground down the piece to make a more reasonable height between turret and hull roof(grinding off that extra 1/8 inch or so) and then reassembled the tank. Immediate Improvement To anyone that plans on getting this piece, or already has, I would highly recommend doing this because it makes the tank look like it should.
So after that, there wasn't anything left that really bugged me about the tank. The running gear work ok, the construction seems a little less sturdy than previous King Tigers (suspension still works, but it seems the running gear might break if taxed too much), but saying that I don't do a whole lot of rolling my tanks around it didn't bug me all that much. And I already went over in another thread how the real "332" had a monobloc gun instead of the 2-piece in another thread so i won't go over that again. FOV kind of skimped on the accessories with this one, but that's another mixed bag because honestly I already have enough panzershreks and chairs and helmets and little kittens and barrels and ammo crates to last me a while
-Kevin
